Cloud Office Migration Decision Points for Enterprises
As it is when undertaking any critical activity that requires organization-wide process changes, enterprises need to make a series of mission-critical decisions when planning for a cloud office migration. The decisions associated with the needle-mover areas determine the overall outlook for the planned migration project.
While the corporate-level readiness must happen through internal meetings and discussions, we at CloudFuze (as a migration solutions provider) can share the partnership-level decision points that your IT team and other stakeholders involved in the project need to consider.
1. Choosing the Migration Partner
The first and the most important decision area for all enterprises is to choose a migration solutions provider and partner with the vendor for planning and performing the entire migration project. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for migration tool assessment, your team can use (or at least take some insights) the framework below:
| Discovery Areas | Assessments |
|---|---|
| Migration Tool Features and Technology | Does the migration tool of the vendor meet your organization’s cloud office migration needs, such as moving files and folders with permissions intact? |
| Security and Compliance | How does the migration vendor access and handle your company’s sensitive data stored in the cloud? If you are representing a Europe or UK-based enterprise, does the vendor comply with GDPR? What other security compliances does the vendor adhere to? |
| Cost Implications and ROI | What factors of the migration project determine the cost? Is the finalized cost a set price or does it vary depending on the scope of work? How does the ROI from the migration look like? |
| SLAs and Overall Support | What type of support is provided as a standard? Are there additional services, e.g., managed migration services, that offer additional support? |
2. Planning the Scope of Work as per the Migration Use Case
Another critical decision point for enterprises is to plan the scope of work (SOW) for the migration. It is in your organization’s best interest to factor in the migration use case when planning the SOW. With this approach, you can ensure a high level of alignment which, in turn, helps your teams achieve the organizational goals with the migration.
Here are some of the specific decision points to plan an enterprise-level migration SOW:
- The Level of Replication Needed: The higher the level of source cloud structure replication needed, the larger the scope of work. And for many enterprises, ensuring complete replication in the target cloud environment with a high level of accuracy helps avoid end-user impact and streamline the overall change management process.
- Infrastructure Required for the Migration: Enterprises that have comprehensive migration requirements best benefit from dedicated servers to transfer users and data without the risk of downtime. Make sure to choose the most optimal migration infrastructure for your enterprise organization to maintain the best performance and a high level of security during the migration.
- Managed Migration for a Complete Handholding: Large-scale enterprise migrations are often complex and it can become highly challenging for inexperienced IT teams to navigate through the complexities. This is where a white glove service, such as managed migrations, helps overcome the technical complexities associated with the migration processes.
3. Finalizing the Migration Timeline
It goes without saying that large-scale cloud office migration projects of enterprises are time sensitive, especially for specific use cases, such as mergers and acquisitions, other types of organizational restructuring, and cloud consolidations. Therefore, it is important to ensure that your teams do not go wrong in planning and finalizing the migration timeline.
Use case plays a critical role in informing the migration timeline. For example, if your enterprise organization is consolidating entire cloud operations in a single cloud office suite, it becomes mission critical to move away from the source cloud environments before their licenses expire. It is best to coordinate with the migration vendor when taking decisions around the migration timelines.
4. Planning User Training and Overall Change Management
A lot of decision-making also happens for the post-migration stages, including user training and overall change management, when planning cloud office migrations at an enterprise level. It is important to make a series of right decisions when planning user training, including:
- The decision to plan the extensiveness of the user training program
- The decision to leverage external user training resources are prepare them in-house
- The decision to onboard end-users to the new cloud environment through external help or internal resources
As part of streamlining the change management processes, it is also important to ensure proper adoption and management of the target cloud environment post-migration.
Simplify the Decision-Making with CloudFuze
At CloudFuze, we offer comprehensive cloud office migration solutions for enterprises that encompass all the important aspects of the migration, including accurate replication of the source cloud, high level of security compliance, optimum migration performance without any downtime, end-to-end project management-level support, and streamlined change management.
With our comprehensive migration solutions, we remove the complexities in enterprise-level decision-making regarding the migration project. Get in touch with our team today for a free and no-obligation consultation.
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